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Add more content for why we are doing this. #63

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MichaelCurrie opened this issue Mar 26, 2016 · 2 comments
Open

Add more content for why we are doing this. #63

MichaelCurrie opened this issue Mar 26, 2016 · 2 comments

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@MichaelCurrie
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"An improvement over getting started?"

@slarson
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slarson commented Aug 6, 2016

@MichaelCurrie Can you perhaps suggest more on this?

@MichaelCurrie
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MichaelCurrie commented Aug 7, 2016

A laconic issue right now, to be sure. :)

I think this was a quick note I added as we were having a meeting with someone whose feedback was, we should add more on the "why" of OpenWorm.

This would presumably entail a discussion of how improved biological models help with human disease research. Another less conservative "why" could be a discussion of brain emulation, such as:

OpenWorm is the base case starting the exponential journey towards whole human brain emulation.

  • A long-term goal of the brain emulation research community is to emulate the human brain. The human brain has perhaps 80 billion neurons.
  • So let's start with the simplest model organism with a brain, C. elegans, with just 302 neurons, and simulate its brain. With the first brain done, at great expense and effort, the next brain (perhaps the fruit fly) will take exponentially less time. Then we move up the complexity scale, one whole organism at a time, to zebrafish, mice, cats, monkeys, etc. until we get to the human brain.
  • Plenty of other projects try to simulate millions of neurons at a time, like a cortical column in a mouse, or the visual system of a fruit fly, etc, but no other project is trying to simulate a whole organism's neural network in a 3D simulation.

@tarelli tarelli added the ideas label Jun 28, 2017
@pgleeson pgleeson added this to the Refresh website 2020 - 2 milestone May 29, 2020
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